A construction of Bourgain gave the first 2-source
extractor to break the min-entropy rate 1/2 barrier. In this note,
we write an exposition of his result, giving a high level way to view
his extractor construction.

We also include a proof of a generalization of Vazirani's XOR lemma
that seems ... more >>>

We revisit a classical result of Coppersmith and Shparlinski [CS00] showing bounds on how well polynomials can approximate the discrete log function. They showed that for any univariate polynomial $f(X) \in \mathbb{F}_p[X]$ with $\deg(f) \leq D$, we have:
$$ |\{ x \in \mathbb{F}_p^\times \mid f(x) = dlog(x) \}| \leq \sqrt{2 ... more >>>